Chapter 44
The sky was a milky seafoam green like something had gone beautifully wrong in nature.
Milan and I were eating family meal out of containers on the fire escape—sliced half-smoke on a bed of chili, dollop of sour cream.
I told myself I knew my parents would act this way and therefore I shouldn’t be upset.
Milan was hardly a comfort. While quartering a peach with a pocketknife, she said, “You already know what I think,” then popped the juicy wedge into her mouth.
All this judgment was getting tired, but I didn’t know how to avoid it without keeping everything to myself.
This couldn’t be the rest of my life: this non-choice between absorbing an endless supply of stupid opinions or conforming to vanquish them.
Nia texted me. My spirits lifted even before reading her message, just from seeing her name. Do u wanna come by the studio this afternoon?
I was smiling down at my phone. Milan leaned over my shoulder. I slapped the screen to my chest.
“Isn’t that the girl from that art thing?”
“No.”
“You messy bitch.”
“What! She’s doing my portrait.” This wasn’t wholly true, though I hadn’t told Nia I wouldn’t do it.
She was busy anyway—it wasn’t hard, avoiding the topic when I saw her.
I honestly thought she might’ve forgotten about it.
But even saying it aloud to Milan brought back that buzzed delirium I felt when I first agreed to let her paint me.
Milan flung her fuzzy peach pit across the alley to the trash can and missed. It landed in someone’s yard. “A portrait of what? Your titties?”
I palmed my eyes. “She’s Tristan’s girlfriend anyway.”
“I swear you’re about to be that man’s thirteenth reason why.”
I looked at Nia’s text again, feeling forlorn now.
Tristan had all but ordered me to stay away.
But also: What power did he actually have over me?
I was already deeply rooted in the tradition of doing what the fuck I wanted.
And it was a portrait! I was supporting another woman artist!
It was almost a worse sin than my original one, denying her this request, because what was more important than her work?
Someone might even argue that elevating Tristan’s desires over hers, over my own, would be sexist. Maybe, in a twisted way, sitting for her was how I could begin to redeem myself.
Turning to Milan, I asked, “Should I go?”
“For the plot, yes. For your mental health, no.”
“Okay, I’m going.”
“I’ll be praying for you.”
Nia was smashing something with a hammer. The concentrated line of her mouth didn’t lift when my fist rapped on her studio door.
“It’s stained glass from an abandoned church,” she explained. “I’ve been trying to figure out how I could use it for weeks.” She shook her head, pieces of hair falling from her clipped-back bun. “I don’t know. I just picked up my hammer today and started smashing it.”
I idled in the doorway, terrified this was some kind of metaphor. It struck me that maybe she knew about me and Tristan, and I was about to get set the fuck up.
She waved me over, a jerky, hopped-up-on-caffeine gesture. “Come, come,” dragging her stool from beneath her desk.
I carefully lowered myself, trying to gauge the situation, whether I’d made a mistake in coming. “What’s up?”
“I sorted the stuff out with the author but”—she wiped a streak of sweat from her forehead, thin gold bracelet tinkling on her wrist—“you look like someone’s pointing a gun at you. What? I told you I’d text when I was ready to do the portrait, didn’t I?”
“You did!”
She watched me with amused pity, like I was someone’s last-minute third-grade science fair project.
“Anyway, I’ve honestly been depressed, more depressed than I’ve ever been in my life.
” She said this so casually that I might not have taken her seriously had I not understood how someone could keep emotions shoved so deeply inside they became flattened by forgetting.
Nia went on, “I haven’t wanted to paint for weeks because of it, but then, when Cowboy Carter won Album of the Year, it changed everything.
I want to do something like that with you.
The whole Southern Americana but with a spin.
Aren’t your people from Louisiana too?” Before I could ask how she knew this, she said, “Imagine: a black-black background, you with a totally empty expression but that contains everything in it—very faux-strong-Black-woman-coded. I don’t want it to be sexy, I want it to be stoic.
Like those old-fashioned photographs where the people don’t smile.
I want it to be like, oh, this woman is hiding something in plain sight. ”
She was gesturing with her hands, excitement gathering in the air.
Her big smile was like a rope around my body, tightening, tightening, taking the breath from me.
I couldn’t see her vision, and it didn’t matter.
I wanted to help her realize it. I wanted to give her whatever she wanted.
I thought, weirdly, what I felt then was how it might feel the moment you decided to have a child with someone—heady, terrifying, charged with the understanding that you couldn’t turn back.
It was kind of hot, being so definitive about your desire that the sound of a door closing behind you carried no power at all.
When she dragged a massive canvas from behind her cabinet, so big it felt not like a container but a clearing, I knew I’d no longer calculate the cost of being there. This was as much for me as it was for her. I wanted to see what she would do with me.
She got wordlessly to work, preparing her canvas with a thick substance.
While it dried, she studied her brushes spread on a towel, plucking the ones she needed with the delighted but focused quickness of picking dandelions.
As a child, when I thought of an artist, this is what I imagined.
Nia’s posture of confidence, the touch of relentlessness in it.
She was not someone who dithered about the meaning of art.
Its value was not up for litigation, and thus neither was the amount of time she spent making it.
At least that was the aura she radiated.
Some adolescent part of me hoped I could absorb the absolute faith she had and incorporate it into myself.
She said, “Sorry for writing in your book by the way. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Sometimes I start doing something and don’t realize what I’ve done.”
She was talking about Art Monsters. I’d forgotten about it until I reached into my bag for Janine’s notes a few weeks ago and found Nia’s handwriting in the margins.
I felt violated at first, but violation transformed into recognition.
Who didn’t dream of their work being ripped through, ruined, out of love?
“Don’t apologize.”
Her eyes swept over me with a cool neutrality before returning to the painting.
“I actually liked seeing what you highlighted,” I added.
She perked up. “Like what?”
“Everything!”
“Okay, but tell me one thing.”
“The story about that suffragette who used a meat cleaver to slash some famous painting to protest the government. I might be messing up the story.”
“No, it was a meat cleaver,” she said. “I have one. Tristan came over to cook last night and was using it. I told him the story. He thought it was hilarious.”
Hoping to steer the conversation away from Tristan, I said, “How’d you start painting?”
She dabbed small dollops of color onto a glossy sheet. “It’s the only way I can access my thoughts. Otherwise I have no idea what’s going on with me. I started making these scary knit dolls during the pandemic.”
She grabbed her phone to show me a picture.
The doll sat in the palm of her hand, black beads for eyes, a stitched mouth.
I studied Nia from the side while she grinned at the photo.
She had one of those faces that, in profile, looked entirely different than it did head-on.
I wondered what would happen if I just leaned in and buried my face in her perfumed neck.
Then I wondered what the fuck was wrong with me.
When she fell silent, I panicked, afraid we’d run out of things to say.
“I feel like I don’t actually know you,” I blurted.
“What’s there to know?”
“Tons of stuff like where you’re from…” I immediately forgot what you’d want to know about a person.
“Boring Maryland. Divorced parents. I may have ADHD, but I keep missing my diagnostic exam. I hate sharing facts like this, they don’t tell you anything. Oh! Are you poly? Who told me this? Did I tell you about my friend Brooke? She’s poly.”
Nia pulled up Brooke’s Instagram. She was a white girl with bleach-blond hair. I didn’t want to meet any more white people doing nonmonogamy.
“I’m actually trying to decide if I’m going to keep being polyamorous. Or keep doing it, I guess.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Jay doesn’t want to be open anymore.”
“Men love nonmonogamy until you start slanging your punani. Then it’s trouble in paradise.”
“I’m not even slanging it around that much!”
Except for with her boyfriend.
“My dad’s a serial cheater,” she said. “But the second my mom even glanced in somebody’s direction, it was a problem. Ugh, this is not the color I want.” She scraped something away with a palette knife. “Your face is a challenge. That’s why I wanted to paint it, of course.”
I almost told her that her face was a challenge, too, but it was also perfect. I sat on my hands until it hurt to distract from the heat in my chest.
“So, what are you going to do?” she asked with such earnest curiosity, I started to tear up. Quickly, I rubbed away the moisture with my knuckle.
“I don’t know. I love him.”
“But he doesn’t love the way you are.”
She looked at me with sympathy. I turned away, my eyes hot, stinging.
I knew I shouldn’t feel embarrassed to cry about Jay, but it felt like I didn’t have the right to, that I had all the power to be with him and yet I was choosing this nebulous identity instead.
And the choice felt impossible, like in those tales where a genie grants you three wishes, but the wishes can never represent your true wants.
There’s always a caveat, a trick. It’s never what you actually wished, but a bastardized version of it.
Nia returned to the painting. She was kindly ignoring the fact that I was struggling not to cry.
She finished an hour later, rinsing her brushes, splattering paint-streaked water everywhere.
“This time again? Next week? Oh, wait, I have something. I’ll call you. If I don’t, I’ll see you in class.”
“Okay.”
I stumbled toward the door with a pounding heart, feeling like I’d just committed a crime, being there with her.
“Cat,” she called.
I turned, hoping she’d asked me to stay. Maybe we could get coffee, walk around campus, talk.
What she said was: “It’s not worth it, sacrificing yourself like that for a man. That’s just how I feel. But it’s your life.”
I thanked her though it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I left with a massive weight on me, even more wrecked by this decision before me with not enough time or wisdom or will to make it.